Review: HTC Droid DNA

No Big Deal

Photo by Alex Washburn/Wired

When you’re contemplating the vast expanse of glass covering any one of the current models of smartphones with supersized screens, you have to ask yourself: How big is too big? Is a 5-inch display that much better than a 4.5-incher? Does native 1080p capability actually matter on a smartphone? How big of an advantage does such a device earn?

HTC Droid DNA

6/10

Wired

The 1920 × 1080 display is the best on any phone, both on paper and in real life. Mostly flawless performance from the quad-core CPU, 2GB of RAM and Verizon’s 4G LTE network. Looks kinda badass. Attention to ergonomic detail is evident in the curved glass and the curved, soft-touch back.

Tired

Crappy battery life. Display isn’t significantly better than the screens found on top rivals. At 5 inches, the screen is too big — a pain to use with one hand. Little hangnail plastic USB port cover has got to go.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the HTC Droid DNA. Its massive 5-inch 1920 × 1080 display has the same resolution as the best HDTV sets lining the shelves at your local retailer. It sports a pixel density of 440 pixels per inch, which bests all the big-name competitors — the Google Nexus 4 (320ppi), the HTC One X (316ppi) and 8X (341ppi), and the Apple iPhone 5 (326ppi).

While a 1080p screen is mighty pretty, it’s not a killer feature on a smartphone, and it does not make the device significantly better than the current crop of 720p-capable phones.

But while this looks great on paper, it doesn’t matter much at all. Seriously. Don’t get me wrong: The DNA’s display is gorgeous, and arguably the best-looking smartphone display out there. But to the naked eye, and over a couple of weeks of daily use, it doesn’t look significantly better than the phones mentioned above, and that’s a good thing. The fact is, they all look great. On any one of them, pixels are indiscernible and text looks crisp and clean, rivaling a printed page. Colors are vivid and bright. Photos, video, apps, websites, magazines, every single thing displayed on screen is rendered beautifully.

The bottom line is that while a 1080p screen is mighty pretty, it’s not a killer feature on a smartphone, and it does not make the device significantly better than the current crop of 720p-capable phones. And this is a wonderful thing for consumers. Smartphone displays are better than they have ever been. Today, we expect top-tier phones to come with Retina-quality screens, and anything less is deemed unacceptable.

While the DNA’s display looks stunning, the size of the thing makes it difficult to use the phone with one hand. While it isn’t as audaciously oversized as the 5.5-inch-display on the Samsung Galaxy Note II, the DNA’s touchscreen can still be a bit of a hassle. The slightly smaller 4.7-inch displays on the Nexus 4 and One X are far more comfortable. Even the 4.8-inch display on the popular Samsung Galaxy S III is easier to use with a single hand — and 4.8 inches is about the largest smartphone display that I’ve been able to comfortably operate thus far. It’s here that the DNA’s display doesn’t make it more useful, but counts against it.

Photo by Alex Washburn/Wired

Another sticking point is the paltry battery life. In over a week of testing the handset, I wasn’t able to make it through an 8-hour workday without having to charge up the 2020 mAh Lithium-ion cell before I headed home. On the weekend, while running errands and using Google Maps, Yelp, Twitter and the camera throughout the day, battery life flew by and I found myself stopping to charge up by midday, and again in the evening. If you buy the DNA, you’ll want to pick up a spare charger to go with it.

Each time I had to charge up, I was greeted by an annoying little plastic door covering the USB port on the bottom of the DNA. When this tiny door is closed, the DNA looks sleek and smooth. But opening the door reveals a flimsy piece of plastic that feels like it’s hanging on for dear life. It feels like it’s only a matter of time before that little door breaks off. While everything else on the DNA feels lovingly designed and well built, this door is a weak point. HTC should have just left the port exposed, as most phones do nowadays.

Photo by Alex Washburn/Wired

Aside from that quirk, HTC has done great design work. The Droid DNA is a unique and menacing-looking phone, draped in black with red highlights. It’s about 5.55 inches tall and 2.78 inches wide. It has a curved back that’s 0.38 inches at its thickest and 0.16 inches at the edges. The ergonomic shape is enhanced by a soft-touch coating on the rear. Along the left and right edges of the handset are red anodized metal grills. It looks like some speakers should be hiding in there, but the grills are just for looks — a pinhole speaker is on the back, just under a Beats Audio logo (at least the grills add a bit of personality). Above the display is a metallic red headset speaker, with a milled red power button up top. The power button is one of the lowest-rising power buttons I’ve seen, but it remains responsive. Next to that is a headphone jack.

If you buy the DNA, you’ll want to pick up a spare charger to go with it.

Finishing off the red accents is an anodized ring around the DNA’s 8-megapixel rear camera. Both the camera and its LED flash are inset, and nearly flush with the DNA’s rear so they’re not sticking out (as was the case on HTC’s One X of and One S). The look is a familiar one, but it’s still cool in an Eye of Sauron kind of way.

While running on Verizon’s 4G LTE network (which is blazingly fast, and offered me great coverage in San Francisco) and powering a 5-inch 1080p display is taxing on the battery, it’s thankfully not terribly taxing on the DNA’s internals. Namely Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, clocked at 1.5GHz, an Ardeno 320 GPU and 2GB of RAM — basically the same guts as we saw in the Nexus 4, which offers better battery life and was easier to use with one hand, but isn’t available on Verizon’s network.

Photo by Alex Washburn/Wired

As expected, the DNA is fast, powerful and well-performing. Most everything ran smoothly and quickly — launching apps, switching between apps, navigating around HTC’s Sense 4+ skin over the top of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Games ran smoothly and looked fantastic on the DNA’s large display, as did videos from YouTube, Netflix, Google Play and Vimeo. However, I did notice a slight stutter every now and then when trying to scroll through webpages in Chrome. It wasn’t a huge bother, but the DNA does fall slightly short of the reliably smooth performance seen on the Nexus 4 and HTC’s One X (which is only available through AT&T).

Camera performance, on the other hand, was top-notch. The quality and detail of the DNA 8-megapixel/1080p rear camera is superior for both photos and video. Even the camera software felt faster here than on other HTC phones like the One X.

One of my favorite features on the DNA is the curved edges of the phone’s display. Rather than laying flat and ending in hard right angles, as we saw on HTC’s Sprint-exclusive Evo 4G LTE, the outtermost edges of the DNA’s display roll into the sides of the phone, flowing into the rubberized back and red side-grills like. As you’re sliding your fingers around the display (likely with two hands most of the time), the added smoothness along the edges is really nice. Such curved displays are becoming a design trademark of HTC phones, and I really hope the company sticks with it.

But, as wonderful and satisfying the curved Gorilla Glass 2 display on the DNA is, I can’t use this phone without wishing the screen wasn’t a little bit smaller. The massive, high-density display is the DNA’s hallmark feature, but at the same time, it’s the phone’s biggest drawback.